


Through Empty Eyes

by Lilith (Citrine)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fairly dark Mrs Hudson, Gen, Halloween witchery, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-09
Updated: 2012-11-09
Packaged: 2017-11-18 07:09:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/558250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Citrine/pseuds/Lilith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was always so with him; her omens, her never-world, all belief denied and yet still he came, ill-met by moonlight, to rituals and Sabbats.  Still he treasured the skull, ancestral bone, shining with an eerie light.  She watched the fluttering flame flicker behind blind eye sockets.</p><p>“You don’t see the hollow grief in the eyes of those who mourn you.”</p><p>“John?” he whispered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through Empty Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be posted for Halloween, but I didn't quite make it.
> 
>  
> 
> Disclaimer: Don't own, no profits made, just for fun.

The light fell like gossamer crystal, a shimmering beam of moonlight on the rooftops. Mrs Hudson stood on the very edge, a heartbeat from eternity.  An almost perfect full moon hung low over the gothic turrets of St James church.  The stars were absent, blinded by the electric lights of London.

It was almost time to go and this year she would go alone.

She turned on her heel, black, patent, stiletto sharp. Her hand slipped into the pocket of her dress, a purple so dark it was almost black, and the old iron key shivered under her fingers.

Mrs Hudson locked the door to the roof before she made her down from the dusty attic. It didn’t pay to take unnecessary risks.  There were so many thieves about and so many darkling spirits in the crystal-cut night. She had warded the door with garlic and ancient charms. It would hold against all comers until she returned.

The inside of the front door had been decked in the same dark apparel. This was not a night to take a chance upon an empty house.

She stepped out into the street just as the church clock struck eleven. The children, bed sheet ghosts with green paper masks, who had come trick or treating earlier had long since departed. A group of youths, all cropped hair and attitude hung around outside Baker Street station. They jeered at her as she passed, but she ignored the ribald comments, only reacting when they tried to snatch the heavy shopping bag out of her hand.

“Leave it,” she said, not the least bit afraid.

The boy hesitated and she turned contemptuously away. Two young girls ascending the escalator hand in hand were prey for the beast and she was immediately forgotten. An old woman in a black coat with a purple scarf round her neck. She was of no interest to anyone, unimportant and insignificant.

Mrs Hudson liked it that way.

She sat on the tube as it rattled westwards through dark tunnels far beneath the city. It was half empty at this time of the night. A group of students got on at Green Park dressed as witches and wizards, giggling and swinging from the handrails.  When they tumbled off a couple of stops later the hush was disturbed only by a Chinese girl sobbing in her boyfriend’s arms. Weary people on their way home from work and others bound for the graveyard shift pretended not to notice her distress. Mrs Hudson gave her a handful of tissues and some dark chocolate. It cost nothing to be kind.

She alighted at the end of the line, in a cavernous station where her footfalls echoed in the silence.

The surrounding streets were also silent. Many houses had their curtains drawn, others were still and black.  Mrs Hudson passed only a single dog walker with an Alsatian that bared its fangs at her.  

Only leaves underfoot and half-bare trees above her now.  Those who heard her gossip and giggle would not have believed it, but Mrs Hudson liked her solitude. She had never been one for gatherings, for covens. She had always preferred to work alone. Only one exception. Ever.

She was not as agile as she had once been, but she was slender enough to slip through where the high Victorian gates had rusted away from the wall. They cast long spiked shadows onto the path and over the nearest graves.

When she turned off the gravel path her heels sunk into the rain drenched earth. Mrs Hudson stopped by a tomb, old enough for the names of its occupants to have weathered into oblivion. She rested her bag on it, heedless of those who lay beneath. They were not her dead. Mrs Hudson lifted an object out of the bag and cradled it in her arms as if it were a babe, a changeling child of ancient lineage.

All Hallows. The night of the dead.

The moonlight was starkly silver on the marble tombstones and stars glimmered over the wild expanse of the cemetery. 

She lowered her gaze from the midnight sky to the invisible path that lay before her.  The ground under her feet was barbed with brambles and tangled with thick strands of ivy.  An ancient yew, older by far than the cemetery, overhung the path and she ducked under its wide branches.  Berries fell in a cascade of deep red poison, into her hair and into the empty eye sockets of the skull in her arms. 

Mrs Hudson paused for a moment when she reached the open expanse of long grass. She stroked her hand across the smooth white bone skull and raised her gaze in silent homage to the shining moon. Then she went on, towards the black marble tombstone chiselled with gleaming gold.

Her knees and her hip protested when she knelt on the cold earth. She placed the skull gently on the grave and bowed her head in silent reverence to the old gods.

Bell, book and candle.

She cast a pentagram, marked out in stones on the unhallowed ground with the moon kissed skull at its centre.

Pumpkins lit by beeswax. Turnips lit by tallow. A human skull lit by a guttering rush light.

The old ways were the best. 

She had fashioned the candle herself, rendering down the fat from the carcass. Animal fat. All teeth and sharp claws. All blood and gore. She had never practised human sacrifice. Never yet, unless one counted her late husband and that had been nothing of ritual, nothing of darkness.

Mrs Hudson lit the black candle. The flame flared, blue in the wind that gusted over the graves.

She rose to her feet.  At one with the night, fearing neither the living nor the dead, she waited. 

Mrs Hudson didn’t jump when his black gloved hands clasped her shoulders.  She breathed out; a long relieved sigh that lingered in a frost cloud above his grave. 

“Do you remember how it rained last year?” he said. “How it sliced and slashed at the trees and that young owl caught in the vortex, impaled upon a marble angel’s wing?”

“I told you that it was an ill omen.”  She reached up and laid her hand over his. Cold leather under her fingers and thin flesh beneath.

He snorted, as contemptuous as ever of her omens and talismans.

“You may scoff, dear, but you haven’t forgotten it, a screeching tangle of white feathers and blood. I said that it was bad and it was.” She shivered in the chill night air. “How much pain has there been over this past year? How much grief?”

“That was nothing to do with your ill-omened owl.” He squeezed her shoulders gently. “Human cruelties and human frailties, and none of it anything to do with your witchery.”

It was always so with him; her omens, her never-world, all belief denied and yet still he came, ill-met by moonlight, to rituals and Sabbats.  Still he treasured the skull, ancestral bone, shining with an eerie light.  She watched the fluttering flame flicker behind blind eye sockets.

“You don’t see the hollow grief in the eyes of those who mourn you.”

“John?” he whispered.

“Lost. Roaming. I’ve had a phone call from Newcastle, an email from Hamburg and a postcard from San Francisco. He’ll be in Australia next.”   She had hoped that John would stay, but he had refused to return to Baker Street. Instead he tried to out distance the anguish that was seared into his soul.

“And you?”

“I weep in empty rooms and I miss you.” In all the long decades of her life there had been so few that she truly loved. “Nothing’s been the same since you…left.”

“I won’t be gone forever. I’ll be back to haunt you soon enough, a creaking tread on the stairs, a gunshot in the night. It’ll be as if time stopped and the clock froze at the hour of thirteen, everything just as it was before.”

“Don’t delay for too long. Once I was the maiden, young and virginal, now I’m the crone of death. How many more times will the wheel turn? How many more Hallows before I’m buried under the black earth?”  

She tried to turn, to face him in the glittering night.

“No.” His hands tensed and then he wrapped his arms around her waist, holding her fast. “Soon, I promise.”

“How soon?”  She reached up and back. Her fingers brushed over his cold cheekbone and icy skin. “Will you come at Candlemas in a blaze of light?”

“Not quite that soon.” He chuckled softly against her ear. “I’ll come at Beltane.”

“I’m too old for Beltane.”

“Not you. Never you.” His arms tightened around her for an instant, a rocking embrace of which she was suddenly bereft.

Her heels sunk into the mud when she spun around. Tombs, more shadow than substance under the black sky. The invocation of the wind in the stark branches high above her, dying leaves drifting down and frost shimmering on mildew.

Nothing else. Nothing more.

Mrs Hudson knelt again at his grave, heedless of the grind in her old bones. She completed the ritual. The candle guttered into darkness and the light died in the eyes of the skull.

Yet there was still a ghost of warmth in the bone when she wrapped it in her velvet scarf and placed it carefully into her bag. It was far too early for the first tube and she lingered, wandering like a spectre among the graves. Night and death held her as he had done.

Venus rose, an incandescent beacon in the eastern sky.  

She didn’t wait for the dawn to steal away the dark magic.

There was a café in a Victorian back street, as dingy as Dickens, frequented by whores, tramps and all the lost of London. The tea was sour, the milk suspect, but she folded her hands around its heavy china heat. These meetings were never easy, but she was glad that he had come to her.  

Beltane he had said and she believed him absolutely.

Yet such promises were not always easy to keep.

Mrs Hudson looked around. They were the dregs of London, street children and derelicts. No one would mourn them, no one would even notice when the ancient city engulfed them. Never yet. The blood had always been feline, canine, once a chicken that had squawked alarmingly. He had laughed at her struggles with the wretched, wriggling bird. 

She would do anything and everything to bring him home.

It was the first of November. Still Hallowtide. And tomorrow was All Souls Day, the feast of the dead, ripped from its pagan roots and made over in the guise of the white Christ. She would bake soul cakes and there was still that bottle of clover honey mead at the back of the cupboard. It would make the bitterest of poisons taste sweet.

There was a woman chain smoking at the table opposite. Bleached hair, chipped nail polish on fingers that were red with cold. Sandals in November, leggings and a man’s baggy sweatshirt.   Her life was jammed into a couple of black bin bags at her feet.

“Wot are you starin’ at?” the woman demanded.

“I was just thinking how terribly cold you look.”  Mrs Hudson gave her a motherly smile. “Why don’t you let me buy you a nice hot cuppa, dear?”

 

 


End file.
